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Monday, May 15, 2017

I'm releasing an updated version of the UIBI book today, with the following changes.-Minor editing and changes to figure names in all chapters.-Minor updates to several chapters, including "Detailing" and "Special Structures" (formerly Setae and Hairs).-Major rewrite of the "Shading" chapter.I was planning to wait a few months before publishing a new version, but my previous ideas about hatching and stippling in Inkscape were so very very wrong. I have literally wasted tens of hours of my life (or more!) trying to make regular hatch and stipple patterns in Inkscape using work around methods, when the "Pattern" fill option works very well for both of these if you understand how to adjust the density of the pattern. I only discovered this today. Ugh. Fortunately, shading isn't a major part of my line art style. And everyone else can learn from my mistakes. There is also a new curved hatching method included, using the Calligraphy Tool.UIBI Version 1.1

Friday, May 12, 2017

Years ago, I posted a short guide to illustrating insect genitalia in Inkscape. Now in the shadow of my dissertation writing, I've managed somehow to write a more complete booklet version.

It's free, just like Inkscape! I take you through my line drawing process step by step, from importing sketches, to laying down and modifying lines, to making special structures like setae, to finishing and exporting. I also include some more experimental techniques which may be of interest to other sorts of Inkscape users. Enjoy!

Tuesday, May 10, 2016

The Fly Trap is a modern creative novel: one part biography, a second part history of entomology, a third scientific explanation, with rapture at flies mixed throughout. I’ve been reading Moby-Dick recently, and the similarities are striking. There’s the same tendency to switch themes between paragraphs and chapters, to weave the scientific, historical, and biographical together, and to embiggen fact when necessary. But what draws the entomologist in is Fredrik Sjöberg’s replacement of Melville’s whales with flies and the hope that the author will do the subject of our work and life passions the justice they deserve. How often is any particular family of insects besides butterflies made the subject of literature? Sjöberg’s centerpiece is the two-winged fly family Syrphidae, more commonly known as “hover flies” or “flower flies”, names which refer to incredible flight capabilities and the tendency to be nectar feeders. They are commonly yellow and black mimics of bees and wasps. Unlike the animals they’re mimicking they have no stingers to deter predators, so they avoid predation by looking like something dangerous. Sjöberg peppers his chapters with vignettes about individual species, including everything from taxonomic and regional history, physical and ecological diagnoses, and personal anecdotes. My favorite is the sudden “invasion” of Eristalis smilis which overtook the Swedish countryside, contrasted with Doros, of which there are only occasional sightings and elaborate rumors. The other subjects are “islands”, whether those be Sjöberg’s home island of Runmarö or a tree stump in a recent clear-cut. “Islands are generalizations of a kind”, he writes. “And where there are no islands, we have to invent them. If only for the fun of it.” He cites the loneliness and isolation of islands both positive and negative. Islands are perfect ground for the cataloger, sometimes disparaged as “buttonologist”, who provides a complimentary and more detailed worldview for “mapmakers”.

“But the person who makes maps can never include everything in his picture of reality, which remains a simplification no matter what scale he chooses. Both attempt to capture something and to preserve it.”

I particularly enjoyed his description of the Fly Tree, an enormous, 500 year old black poplar that was an island ecosystem onto itself. These species descriptions and descriptions of “islands”, are the stepping stones on which Sjöberg’s stories rest. Yes, stories. There are actually two stories here, two interwoven biographies. One is of the author’s work with hover flies. The other biography is of the heroic, larger than life Rene Malaise, who sits in sharp contrast to the author. Malaise was a great explorer, eponymous trap inventor, and collector abroad, especially in eastern Russia and Southeast Asia. Sjöberg tries to avoid all collecting and exploration beyond his small island in the Baltic Sea. He says of the tropics, “Tropical nights can build into tremendous explosions of downright Cambro-Silurian cacophony when a thunderstorm starts or cicadas celebrate their orgies in the treetops. They’re magnificent, but no more than that. The indescribable sound of the Madagascar nightjar is worth the entire trip, but in the end it is merely interesting and exciting and fun to tell people about later.” Of the Congo River basin, “What an adventure! What stories I would tell! About freedom! But it didn’t happen. I never managed to say much more than that the forests were vast and the river as broad as Kalmar Sound. And that I’d been there.” Yet he idolizes Malaise and his travels, to the point where he starts a collection of Malaise-related ephemeralia. This ends ironically with an expensive purchase of a painting once belonging to Malaise. The author, so adverse to crazed collecting, has become a buttonologist. But Sjöberg stays to his island, claming glorious isolation and “slowness” allow him an illusion of control over these impulses. One of The Fly Trap’s most overreaching themes is what Eliezer Yudkowsky calls “The Virtue of Narrowness”. Sjöberg’s collection only contains the 202 species of hoverflies (plus one) found thus far on Runmarö island. He feels he must justify his narrowness, so he writes that it’s purely for pleasure. No, it’s because he loves the D.H. Lawrence style of isolation provided by islands. No, it’s a sort of “buttonology”, a collecting disorder, which in his case is benign. No, it’s an attempt to slow down in our fast-paced world. He doesn’t beg the reader to accept his reasons for collecting and observing his island’s hover flies as scientific. Even when he claims his study allows him to “read nature’s language”, the result is for enjoyment. Maybe he feels he can’t explain the usefulness of this small study on his small island to broader natural history, not even to a lay reader, but I don’t think he needs to. The Virtue of Narrowness is the precision and accuracy of your knowledge. It’s enough to only explain hover flies on Runmarö, and Sjöberg knows it, but he still claims “hobby” because it’s not his “real” job. True, he does romanticize his narrowness whenever possible. But I enjoy some romanticized narrowness. In my favorite poem by the midwestern American Tom Montag, “The Farmer’s Manifesto”, the farmer says of his father, “He had no /ideas but the things which /his hands could touch, or /those his eyes could find /at great distance—a glint /of sun off farmhouse windows. /Or close at hand, beneath /his feet. What he could /catch as breath; wind would /carry. He knew those weeds.” Romanticized or not, that sort of narrowness holds an incredible depth of knowledge, what Montag could only name as “strange /dark madness, some amazing avalanche /of wolves, lakes, stars, tongues” and the ability to “hear corn grow in summer; /can hide your face in /the curving surface of sky; /examine a potato in light /so special you know something /flies back at you”. This is the sort of knowledge that comes from doing the same thing repeatedly over a small stretch of world and small number of subjects until they become windows. What seems like buttonology is deep expertise. I don’t mean to say that The Fly Trap is perfection or free from cliche. It belongs firmly within a genre of creative natural history writing first made popular in the 19th century, a Euro-centric and primarily masculine genre written by men for men and boys. Women are largely incidental to the story and are mentioned mostly as love interests or as props. His wife features prominently at the end of the first chapter, but only as the nameless “girl who sat in the audience one evening”. Of professional meetings, he says, “Normally no women take part at all. And the few who do happen to show up are usually the better halves of the biggest crackpots, wives who could easily pass as personal assistance from a psychiatric open ward. Well, maybe that’s unfair. But the fact is that unattached women could hardly find a better hunting ground than entomological societies. Unusual men, no competition. Just a suggestion.” Does that mean the only reason for women to attend meetings is to pick up men? Even the preface quote ends with the condescending line, “Me, I just concern myself with flies — a much greater theme than men, though maybe not greater than women.” The only exceptions are the short biographical sketches of the incredible, possibly lesbianEsther Blenda Nordström, a writer, explorer, and ethnologist who briefly married Malaise and traveled with him to Asia. Unfortunately, her story was abandoned when Sjöberg realized Malaise hadn’t named a species after her, and therefore Malaise’s “love” for her couldn’t be verified (unlike for Ebba Soederhall). I could have read an entire book about Nordström and her travels. Fortunately she wrote several. Unfortunately, I don't read Swedish (but maybe you do). The Euro-centrism is more forgivable. The Fly Trap was originally written and released in Swedish. The intended audience was Swedes, the setting was (mostly) Sweden, and Sjöberg is Swedish himself. The English translation came ten years later, so it should be read as a Swedish novelslashbiographyslashcreative-nonfiction and shouldn’t be taken as worldly. Especially since Sjöberg repeatedly admits his own non-worldliness. I realize I haven’t said very much about flies in this review. Fact is, if you’re still reading this and you haven’t already read The Fly Trap, you probably already have some interest in flies and will be delighted as I was of the hover fly natural history in this book. There isn’t anything to criticize about those descriptions except to say that they’re wonderful and I wish there was more of them. I recommend The Fly Trap for entomologists and non-entomologists alike.

Thursday, September 10, 2015

ZooBank is currently down while I'm writing this, the "official registry of Zoological Nomenclature". This is the registry that all new electronically published names and nomenclatural acts must use before publication, and that all traditionally published nomenclatural acts SHOULD use before publication (but usually don't).I don't know if this is just temporary down time, or this has been going for a while, but it's a definite problem. Especially with the way publishing is going.I was just talking with Morgan Jackson about social media and taxonomic publications, because I woke up with a weird thought in my head this morning: what if I took the taxonomic portion of my dissertation, registered the new names with ZooBank, and published it as a PDF on my blog? Given the standards currently in the ICZN, and assuming I'm meticulous about referencing type specimens and depositories, etc., the new names would be totally available under the code! Any person can do this now, or at least they could if ZooBank was running.This isn't only limited to nomenclatural acts originally published as PDFs. To quote Morgan,

"The Winnower is working to publish, assign DOIs and archive blog posts
and reddit threads right now. There is very little standing in the way
of someone publishing a new species name in an electronic place like
reddit (with the proper [ZooBank] registration and everything) and having
it become valid via Winnower sucking it up...As far as I know they haven't finalized their archiving with [CLOCKSS] yet, so they haven't met all of the Code requirements for
digital publication, but last I talked to them it was in the works"

The Winnower, for those who aren't familiar, is an open access publishing site that uses an open access peer review system. They specialize mostly in commentary on publications (i.e., post publication peer review), but their targets include a wide variety of non-traditional publishing platforms like blogs and web forums. CLOCKSS is an archiving platform for electronic publications, which The Winnower is using to store publications as PDFs. What Morgan is suggesting is that a taxonomic work registered with ZooBank could be originally published on a blog, adopted by The Winnower, and archived with CLOCKSS; thus it would meet all electronic publication requirements of The Code despite not being available in it's original publishing context.
It seems convoluted, but the above scenario is totally workable under the current version of The Code. I can see both positive and negative elements of this. For one, the traditional taxonomic publishing method is incredibly ponderous, even with taxonomic journals such as Zookeys and Zootaxa. Publishing is further complicated by the general feeling in biology that taxonomic works are low priority under the categories "impact" and "significance". It also opens up low or zero cost ways for taxa-hackers to publish their work, and I'm all for that. (That new species of fungus gnat I've been sitting on, for example. Hmmm...)Conversely, I see the recent trend in taxonomy for higher quality publications and the role Zootaxa, Zookeys, and other taxonomic journals have played in this. I would hate for taxonomic publishing to slide back into Townsend-esque quality or for taxonomic vandalism in the mode of a certain Australian snake hobbyist to become more common.Someone will try one of the above methods eventually. Or whenever Zoobank is up and running again. At the time of finishing this, the registry website is available! But it still worries me, because electronic publication is only going to become more important in the next decade. If Zoobank is unreliable, then what of the future of animal taxonomy?Thanks to Morgan Jackson (@bioinfocus) for help in fermenting these ideas.

Thursday, March 19, 2015

I know it’s been a while since my last blog post. I’m deep into research right now and about to defend my thesis proposal. I’m also working on a publication. Which means that my writing time is going elsewhere and not here.My thesis research overall concerns a large and varied tribe of tachinid flies called Blondeliini (Blond-el-ee-ai-nai) or the blondeliines. The core of the work is the Blondelia group of genera, called such because it includes the type genus of the tribe, Blondelia. Females of the Blondelia group have a boat-like keel on the abdomen and a sharp piercing hook for poking holes in things, usually caterpillars.The piercer isn’t an “ovipositor” in the homologous sense, because it doesn’t contain the tube that carries the egg into the host. Instead, the egg tube (the mostly membranous segments 8-10 of the abdomen) travels down the posterior groove in the piercer and into the hole the piercer has made in the host.

In one genus (Eucelatoria), the piercer can be half the body length! I’m not sure why these species have a piercer that long, but there’s some evidence they parasitize caterpillars hidden in rolls of leaves. Some Blondelia group species have spines on the ventral keel, and others have only bristles. Some males of the Blondelia group have hairy patches on their abdomens, and other closely related species are clean shaven. Host use varies; Costa Rican species of the Eucelatoria armigera complex are particular to one or a few species of noctuid moth caterpillar, while the polyphagous species Compsilura concinnata feeds on over 200 species of Lepidoptera.With interesting oviposition behavior, morphology, and a large number of species (>135; not including all the many undescribed Neotropical species) the Blondelia group is an enticing project for a young taxonomist. Do not fall for this trap!Orphaned taxa are those genera or families that are without a current expert or active worker. The Blondelia group, and Blondeliini in general, are a particularly frightening example. Abandonment can be for a number of reasons. In some cases the group isn’t charismatic enough, or is of minimal economic importance. In other cases high diversity and difficult diagnosis are deterrents. A history of poor descriptions and over-splitting genera may be to blame; for this final reason orphaned taxa often have a taxonomic impediment. The longer the period between experts, the greater the impediment to future research becomes.In the case of the Blondelia group, our good friend Dr. Townsend is mostly to blame. He is responsible for naming nearly half of all valid blondeliine genera, and most of these with one species apiece. Add to this his notorious over-splitting, his mediocre descriptions, and his terrible, no good, very bad Manual of Myiology genus key, and very few people are courageous enough to venture forth.However, not all blame can be placed on Townsend. Disregarding the history, blondeliines are a difficult group with many examples of morphological convergence. They are small, usually dark colored, and told apart mostly by arrangements of bristles. Color patterns often fool me.

Left: Sword fly male. Right: NOT sword fly male. Really similar, but really different. Can you see the difference? (Click for embiggen)

I thank Monty Wood for his great work on Blondeliini (1981), without which I would be lost. But this is a preliminary work of broad scope. Efforts focused on a single or a few genera have revealed the scale of the mess yet to be resolved.Diego Inclan (a graduated MS from my lab) and Dr. John Stireman (my PI and advisor) provide a vexing example of this mess in their recent Zookeys paper. In his masters thesis, Diego found that some species considered part of the Neotropical blondeliine genus Erythromelana were clearly not. This lead to a convoluted taxonomic investigation. Below is a paragraph from the Zookeys paper as illustration.

“An example of the taxonomic instability of Neotropical tachinid genera is witnessed in the species Euptilodegeeria obumbrata (Wulp). This species was first classified in the former tachinid genus Hypostena by Wulp (1890; along with many other blondeliines), based on specimens collected in Guerrero, (southwest) Mexico. […] The species was moved by Townsend (1931) to the new genus Euptilodegeeria, moved again to the genus Erythromelana Townsend by Wood (1985) and recently excluded from Erythromelana and resurrected to its previous genus (Euptilodegeeria) by Inclán and Stireman (2013). Although the taxonomy of Tachinidae, particularly of the Blondeliini, is challenging due to the scarcity of clear synapomorphies, the confusion in the generic assignment of E. obumbrata was also due to the limited number of specimens evaluated, the lack of examination of male terminalia and the use of only males for the descriptions. In the present study, we use additional information from male and female terminalia to demonstrate that these “obumbrata” specimens, previously assigned to Hypostena, Euptilodegeeria and Erythromelana, actually belong to the genus Eucelatoria Townsend (1909), in which females possess a sharp piercer for internal oviposition in the host. We also argue that the former species Machairomasicera carinata described from a single female by Townsend (1919) in the monotypic genus Machairomasicera, and later synonymized with Eucelatoria by Wood (1985), belongs to this same species group of Eucelatoria, which we here define and characterize. In the end, taxa that were assigned to four different genera in fact belong to one species group of Eucelatoria, providing an example of the taxonomic confusion that plagues many groups of Neotropical tachinids.” [Emphasis mine]

Many similar issues remain in the genus Eucelatoria. The group may not even be monophyletic. I am not revising all the species in the Blondelia group for my dissertation—or even all the species in Eucelatoria—but the challenge feels insurmountable.There are two ways to publish natural history research. One is to be cautious, to wait until all possible evidence is covered and carefully recorded, all the museums have been visited, and every last lead has been pursued. “I only have one more type to look at, and it’s been missing for 40 years. But I can’t publish until I find it.” The other is to rush wildly into publication with any new finding, getting the information out as quickly as possible. “Never mind the types in that European museum, I have the specimens here and there’s nothing (well) written in the literature to say I’m wrong!” Taxonomists, myself included, fall more on the cautious side. Townsend was an exception. We want all the bits of evidence before we publish our scientific opinions, whether that be new species, synonyms, homonyms, or redescriptions. Caution is great when you start with a clean slate. But in the face of a huge mess caution is paralyzing. How do I start? I’m looking at a great wreck of a building. Do I take the debris out piece by piece and slowly repair? Or do I knock it down, bulldozer the area, and pour a new foundation? I have sat and looked and sat and looked and wondered at my specimens guessing and second guessing myself if what I am seeing is really separate species, or if they have been previously described. This back and forth mental motion is useless. I fear too much of wreaking havoc. But plenty havoc has already been wrought.I think there is a middle ground. Stride boldly, but document everything. Don’t worry too much about creating new species synonyms or mis-associating males and females. Those issues can easily be fixed later. Otherwise you’ll spend the rest of your life waiting for that visit to that one university in Chile (when the type was long since moved to a museum elsewhere). At the same time, document everything and carefully record your findings. If you provide photographs, written description, genitalia drawings, and adequate references to collections and literature in your publications, someone else can build upon this firm basis and correct your mistakes. An excellent example of walking this line is Dr. Lee Herman’s 2013 revision of the New World species of Oedichirus, a genus of rove beetles (Staphylinidae). Dr. Herman, a Curator Emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History, received the “J. O. Westwood Medal and Award for Insect Taxonomy” [PDF] for this publication. Rove beetles have a taxonomic history as equally tortured as tachinid flies. As in tachinids, associating males and females of the same species is difficult. At times only male or female specimens are available, and species were described sometimes based on the male and sometime based on the female. Furthermore, the majority of specimens available (including the types) are too old for modern techinques like DNA Barcoding. Herman could have waited until new specimens were available, but instead he pushes forward. In the methods section he writes, “hypotheses of male/female association proposed herein for the other species can be corroborated or refuted by DNA barcoding techniques using newly collected specimens.” Remember that every “opinion” of natural history is a hypothesis subject to further testing. When our hypotheses are presented as expert opinion but rest on shoddy work they are an obstacle. When we refuse to present hypotheses for fear of being wrong they are also an obstacle. But when our hypotheses are presented boldly and rest on good work, even our mistakes are outweighed by the scientific contribution. I have discovered that it does no good to worry. Any well documented progress is good progress. Anything mopped up is better than the mess we have now.

Thursday, August 14, 2014

Part I; Part II; Part III; Part IV; Part V. When I began this series in January, my intent was to show parallels between recent and historical conflicts in taxonomy and systematics. You may remember Raymond Hoser from the first part and "Call for Comments" post. He is an extreme example, perhaps more extreme than Townsend with his repeatedly forced rhetoric and lack of decorum. In the history of taxonomy, however, this is not unusual.And lest you all get this opinion, let it be said that I, Z. L. 'Kai' Burington, do NOT hate Charles Henry Tyler Townsend.I chose to exhibit him in a negative light, the sort of light that people working on tachinid flies see him in. This is only one half of the story. Contrast my take with Neal Evenhuis's treatment (Page 15 in this PDF). He calls Townsend a "man of wanderlust and mystery" and outlines his many accomplishments, including: world expertise on Diptera and calypterate flies in particular; instruction in pest control (Jamaica); co-ownership of a taxidermy and zoological specimen company; biology professor (Philippines); biological control of the cotton square weevil (Peru); discovery of the fly vector for both verruga and Oruya fever (Peru); doctorate from Washington University; honorary custodian of calypterate flies at the US National Museum; control of leaf cutting ants (Brazil) and other pests (Peru).Evenhuis told my favorite story of Townsend today during his talk at the 8th International Congress of Dipterology, that he traveled across the Amazon in 53 days (not including stops), and arrived in Peru just in time for his 60th birthday; he popped a champagne bottle near the beach in Pacasmayo to celebrate. I can't help but admire his intense energy and fortitude.And then I'm brought back to the reality. Townsend was an ego driven, abrasive man who died quite bitter about his recession from science. The story feels like a one-two punch of schadenfreude, but the aftertaste is more like Townsend's own bitterness. He did many great things, and he is usually remembered for his vandalous legacy and his nutty ideas. Often I see the parallels between Dr. Townsend and the late Dr. Lynn Margulis. Both had incredible expertise. Both did great work. And both had some ego-related nutty ideas which threatened their public face and careers and which leave a shadow on their contributions.I would like to say that things have changed since Townsend. Unfortunately they have not. And I would like to blame all the personality circus acts of this saga on Townsend alone. But I cannot do that either. Coquillett refused to speak with Townsend to try to make things right. Walton, instead of contacting in private, aired his equally abrasive opinions in a public forum. Aldrich, instead of simply cutting off contact and refusing to play along, continued his angry letter sending to his former colleague. And the rest of the dipterist community didn't step forward in outcry against these antics until after the 1925 "Insider History", long after the damage was done. In short, the egos of all people involved were to blame.Things have not changed. I am, as I said above, at ICD8 this week. This morning as I pondered these questions and yesterday's panel on the "Future of Diptera taxonomy and systematics", a colleague said this to me. He said, it's not the differences in methods, or morphology vs. molecular, or ages of the participants that are why these issues--these apparent clashes--continue. The reason they continue is the difference in personalities.The reason why the Townsend saga got out of hand--the egos and personalities of the people involved--is the same reason taxonomy lacks unity in our current crisis.Just before my PhD program started I was working on a short term project at a U.S. museum. At the end of the project one of the curators gave me a long and personal lecture. He said that the most important thing for my future was to be kind and generous to everyone, to promote unity, and to tamp down ego. Because, he said, selfishness and other personality flaws are to blame for our problems in taxonomy.And the people who are most public, most obvious, the loudest, most outspoken people are often the most abrasive, unkind and ungenerous people. I cannot tell you the number of times I have yelled at my email in the past months upon finding yet another message from the ICZN-listserv. This forum, which was supposed to be for finding and giving help and discussing zoological nomenclature, has become a platform for various taxonomists (including Hoser but not limited to him) to argue and curse at each other publicly over their personal disputes. I have spoken with several people about this on Twitter. The general response is that it is going to happen and there's nothing I can do about it. The Taxacom listserv is much the same. Better to ignore it, I was told.Yet THIS is the face we present the world and it is not a pretty face. It is the face of irrelevance. If we let people like Townsend and Hoser be what people see in taxonomy, if they see anything at all, how much longer will our science be considered science at all? How can we live up to the many challenges if there is no public unity? How will our field of work continue if there is no kindness and generosity to each other and to the next generation?Please prove me wrong.

Monday, August 4, 2014

IN THE PREVIOUS POST...Townsend's ego-driven quest to propagate genus names ad infinitum leads to a libelous article attacking John Merton Aldrich. The backlash of his former colleagues suggests he had worn out his welcome.Townsend never returned to North America. Yet, he continued his research much as he had previously, or potentially more fervently. His output between 1915 and 1925 was smaller than the earlier years, but his publication record from 1926 until 1942 (2 years before his death) nearly matches those high numbers. There was the "Synopse dos generos muscoideos da regiao humida tropical da America" (Synopsis of muscoid genera from the tropical rainforest region of America), published in 1927. The Synopsis contains a 100 page dicotomous key with 605 individual couplets, in Portuguese, and uses a system of abbreviation conceived by Townsend. It was undoubtedly as difficult to use then as it is now. Of course, no Townsend publication would be complete without at least one new genus, so he includes 87 pages of them (with several on each page).

New species description from "Synopse dos Generos" (1927). It is both in Portugese and Townsendian abbreviation. Perhaps it is thankful in this case that Townsend described a new genus for nearly every species, as all of his genera are well described in the Manual of Myiology in English (with comparable abbreviations).

And there was the long awaited Manual of Myiology, published in 12 large volumes between 1934 and 1942. If Townsend could be considered to have a Magnum Opus, this is it. It includes complete keys to families, tribes, and genera of "Oestromuscaria" (muscoid flies), descriptions of all genera, and notes on biology and morphology of the various tribes. Volumes 11-12 contained a strange digression from the earlier sections, including chapters on the Tertiary origin of the Moon from a near Oceanic continent, the origin of humans ("Hands cannot remain idle. Doubtless driftwood clubs and fistsized pebbles were their first implements."), the flight mechanics of a Cnephanamyia bot fly traveling at 400 yards per second, and very, very wrong ideas about gravity.

This second to last item, bot flies traveling at Mach I, has it's own story in one of the most bizarre papers ever to be published in an entomological journal. Dr. Peter Adler mentions Townsend in his Insect Morphology course, and says only two things about him. One, that he has a very strange species concept, and two, that he clocked a bot fly traveling at 800 miles per hour. Long before I started working on tachinids I was already aware that Townsend was a strange fellow.

Townsend claimed to have observed this physical impossibility in Arizona at 12,000 ft, which he described originally in the April 1926 issue of Scientific Monthly. After recieving several comments, he wrote in response in his paper titled "On the Cphenemyia flight mechanism and the daylight day circuit of the Earth by flight" (1927) that by traveling at this speed (815 miles per hour) one could circuit the earth in less than a day, or see two days traveling
east. "It is of extreme interest as affording a mark [466 mph] that
should be reached within the next decade; while the more remote future
holds the possibility of riding the tail of high noon or speeding on the
wings of the morning halfway between the equator and either pole. It can
not be denied that the double daylight-day westward circuit will attain
great poularity before the single daylight day circuit is realized."

Since the vibrating wings of a fly are very different than that of a bird or a fixed wing aircraft, he gives the fly flight mechanics its own name, the "Myiopter" groundplan. Townsend proceeds to describe this groundplan in great detail, but not before inserting some off color remarks.

"Regarding the speeds of Cephenemyia, the idea of a fly overtaking a
bullet is a painful mental pill to swallow, as a friend has quaintly
written me, yet these flies can probably do that to an old-fashioned
musket ball. They could probably have kept up with the shells that the
German big-bertha shot into Paris during the world war."

This (to use Townsend's own word) quaint idea was thoroughly debunked by Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir in 1938, who brought the speed down to a more believable but still appreciable 25 miles per hour.In the same year, Townsend published his second paper on synonymy. The first, as you may remember, was published in Science Journal (1911) and was relatively optimistic. The 1927 "What constitutes synonymy?" paper is decidedly bitter and full of schadenfreude. I have transcribed the majority for your enjoyment:

"I have never for a moment considered [these genera] synonymous with
Hilarella. Such synonymy is quite ridiculous. As to the rest of the
world, no one competent to form an opinion had studied material, hence
no opinion existed but rather a complete indifference. Nobody cared a
snap whether these genera were synonyms or not. This forcibly
illustrates what a power lies concealed in the weapon synonymy. A
careful worker may erect valid genera and species. An ignorant or
malicious person may publish an article stating that these valid genera
and species are synonyms, and henceforth they bear the synonymic stigma.
The genera public is not competent to judge of the merits of the case,
and besides has troubles of its own. No one cares a snap about the
matter unless he is making a special study of the group in question. The
original author may publish a refutation of the synonymy. Nobody pays
any attention to him, the public not being interested, and his
refutation is quickly forgotten. Fifty years later, a competent worker
reconizes these genera and species as valid and concludes that they have
lain in the synonymy a half century. Is he technically correct in this
view?Synonymy has too long masqueraded as a court of permanent and
infallible decisions. There is nothing final about synonymy[...]The
synonymic pronouncements of a single individual carry weight in exact
ratio to his ability in the groups concerned. But the general public has
no means of judging of his ability. If he sets himself up as a
specialist and speaks with confident authority, the public accepts him
at his own valuation. He is henceforth at liberty to inflict his
personal opinions on a long-suffering public and to manufacture synonymy
ad libitum. This is the easiest thing in the world to accomplish as long
as the manufacturers escapes detection as a fraud. In fact, it may be
termed systematic pastime. He is knocking everything on the head right
and left as suits his fancy, while the public looks on unconcerned and
practically uninterested. He is destroyed, not building, but no one
cares except the original builder who notes the attempt to level to the
ground his laboriously erected edifices. Yet they are not really leveled
and their status is just as good as before until the synonymy in
question is abundantly endorsed [...] This strong weapon synonymy is not
to be left at the beck and call of every individual."

Upon hearing the above, my darling partner declared "Dear Sir: No one will ever recognize your
true genius, even long after you are dead" and "You mad, Bro?". The imagery of synonymy as a "weapon", of the good taxonomists as the "original builders", of the synonymizers as "knocking everything on the head" and being "destroyed, not building", and that "no one gives a snap" shows Townsend at his low point. This was, after all, just two years past the "Insider History", and before he found a way to publish the Manual of Myiology.In 1944, only two years after the final volume of the Manual was published, Townsend died in his home at Itaquaquecetuba. The total number of publications over his lifetime is in the hundreds, and the total count of species described is near 1500. He seemed to have burned every bridge with his former colleagues. He outlived his "bitter hatreds". Aldrich died in 1934, the "nation's greatest accumulator of dipterological information" (from Melander 1934). Coquillett had long since passed. The works of both were celebrated.

The Townsend obituary published in Revista de Entomologia (1943) paints him in a positive light, as a great entomologist, biologist, linguist, author, farmer, hunter of beasts, and a member of numerous scientific societies. Yet, to taxonomists who work with tachinids, he is remembered most for his ego and vandalism.Epilogue